Killing Them Softly: The Hitman Story, Part 1

“When working long shifts, like 48 hours or more, the world becomes a really surreal place, as it seems like your brain can't tell reality and dream apart,” explains IO Interactive’s Tore Blystad. “The IO office doesn't have air conditioners as it is an ‘intelligent building’ that replaces air automatically, so it opens the ceiling windows at 02:00 in the morning.

“Sitting directly underneath those ceiling windows was really chilly but it did keep us awake almost as effectively as the espressos.”

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When working long shifts, like 48 hours or more, the world becomes a really surreal place.

Blystad, game director on the recent Hitman: Absolution and art director on fan-favourite Hitman: Blood Money, is reminiscing about the memory that best defines his time working on the Hitman series to date. Blystad paints a grim scene of developers shivering away at their computers, assaulted by the crisp, Copenhagen cold; a cruel form of torture indeed, especially layered on top of the kind of crunch developers regularly slog through.

Not nearly as cruel as the type of punishment series stalwart Agent 47 doles out, of course. He’s been serving up fates far worse than this for more than 12 years now. But let’s start at the beginning.

The history of IO Interactive is an interesting one. It was founded in 1998 as part of a joint-venture deal with Nordisk Film (Scandinavia’s biggest film and TV distributor and the exclusive distributor of PlayStation products in the region) and seven members of an existing studio called Reto-Moto. Since then IO has gone through a series of hands, including Eidos, SCi and Square Enix, but its first project – Hitman: Codename 47 – would set the tone for its most noteworthy output.

“I guess we had two, but very different challenges,” says Janos Flösser, chief creative officer at Eidos and one of the founders of IO Interactive. “The first was to secure funding for a start-up, and have someone to believe in the idea. We negotiated with a great many publishers and investors at the time. We ended up with Eidos, mostly because they believed in the game and the talent of the team.”

“It took six months of negotiations.”

“The second challenge was to convincingly balance between a very controversial subject, killing for money, and great humour without compromising either of them.”

But Hitman: Codename 47 is not the game IO Interactive set out to make. At least, not initially.

Early concept art from the vaults at IO Interactive.

“Hitman was originally supposed to be a quick and easy-to-produce action shooter to prove to our partner [Nordisk film] that the team was capable of releasing a game,” says Jacob Andersen, currently game director of Heroes and Generals at Reto-Moto and previously game director on Hitman: Contracts at IO. “It turned out far more complex.”

“When we laid out the design for Codename 47 there really wasn't anything we could compare it to or steal from so we had to do a lot of testing different features and mechanics. Obviously we made a lot of mistakes but that’s just part of creating unique designs.”

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When we laid out the design for Codename 47 there really wasn't anything we could compare it to or steal from...

Hitman: Codename 47 quickly evolved from a John Woo-esque blast ’em up to a game that pushed the envelope in the stealth genre. The team was suddenly doing things that hadn’t been done before, and it was trying to accomplish it all in a non-linear space.

“I think the biggest challenge was to design the open ended missions in combination with neutral characters,” says Andersen. “With most other games it’s a binary situation where the enemies have either seen you or not, but in Hitman they have to figure out if you break your disguise. That and the 'sort-of' non-linear level design was very challenging.”

Funnily enough, while Hitman: Codename 47 became a more complex game than the team at IO could’ve imagined, the same can’t be said for the title itself.

“The title was originally just a working title – most people on the team though it was too simple,” says Andersen. “But with time it stuck and in the end nobody could come up with anything better.”

Andersen’s defining memory of his time at IO on the Hitman series is a positive one: revisiting the original Hitman: Codename 47 in a summerhouse with IO colleagues Rasmus Kjær and Janos Flösser “for some pre-Hitman Contracts planning and finding out that, bugs and bad controls aside, it was actually a pretty good game.”

Before Contracts, however, came the game that really put IO on the map: Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Codename 47 may have had its crosshairs firmly trained on the stealth genre, but Silent Assassin was the game that took the shot.

With Silent Assassin no longer a PC-only title like its forebear, the team grew considerably in size for the follow-up to Codename 47. The challenge was great.

“From a technical point of view, pre-Hitman Absolution Hitman games had everything running in memory at once,” explains Rasmus Højengaard, formerly of IO Interactive and currently the director of creative development at Crytek. “For the PS2 and Xbox consoles [this] made ridiculous optimisation efforts necessary which was a huge challenge for both engineers and artists, and often quite frustrating from a creative direction point of view.”

“Generally creating an open sandbox game is very challenging, and given the low-key and subtle gameplay characteristics of Hitman games, the challenge doesn’t become smaller. Hitting the subtle notes and meta experience well and making the whole thing gel is very hard but very rewarding when it happens.”

The sequel marked the series’ debut on consoles and came from nowhere for most console players, considering a great deal of them had not been exposed to the PC original. The success of Silent Assassin surprised the team.

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I don't think anyone expected this game to become such a hit.

“I don't think anyone expected this game to become such a hit,” says Blystad.

Of course, a decade ago information like that didn’t travel as fast. It was some time before IO became aware it truly had a series on its hands.

“Today the information travels within seconds and everything is heavily monitored, but it is true that information travelled far slower back then and it took time to realise that the game was a hit,” says Blystad.

So much has changed between Silent Assassin and the present day; back then you could have a fairly crushingly difficult, slow-paced game, with no achievements or trophies, no multiplayer, no DLC and be a total success. Silent Assassin was a game that could be toyed with almost endlessly, tinkering and experimenting with the levels, fooling around with cheats, and more. This change has come with a price.

“The world has developed into a direction where things moves fast and people have a hard time holding their focus for long periods of time,” says Blystad. “Most people are constantly multitasking and few media can lay full claim to people's attention. So creating a game where the player has to invest at least some hours of intense focus for every session is limiting your audience considerably.”

Fooling around with cheats, so to speak, is also fast becoming a relic of a bygone era. With a few notable exceptions the industry has largely moved on from shenanigans like Silent Assassin’s hilariously macabre ‘Nailgun Mode’.

“Games are supposed to be more serious now and these kind of cheats belong in an era where games were just toys, not ‘living breathing worlds’ that are ‘immersive’, ‘visceral’ and ‘photorealistic’,” says Blystad. “Also games are getting so complex that very few people on the team can actually create these cheats on their own without breaking some system in the game. That means the cheat has to be produced by a team, and the cheats rely on being made on impulse, by someone that just want to have fun, as opposed to a planned feature in the game.”

The huge success of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin cemented 47 as franchise material, although getting his next outing done in time would prove to be a remarkable race against the clock...

Return to IGN soon for a look behind the scenes of Hitman: Contracts and Hitman: Blood Money, plus more exclusive artwork from IO Interactive. In the meantime, check out IGN’s Hitman: Absolution review here and the Hitman HD Trilogy review here.

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and Leon: The Professional on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.